You say Los Angeles is proof of man’s impact on the environment. There is some truth to this, however, the indians call the LA basin “the land of 10,000 smokes.” LA is geographically unsuitable for handling any form of pollution, whether from forest fires, power plants or automobiles with an on shore breeze trapping gases against a mountain barrier on the east side of the basin. Citing LA as an example of man’s damage to the environment is the sort of cherry picking that characterizes the folks on your side of the debate.

As far as when we should transition from fossil fuels to other forms of energy, all we need to do is watch the price signals in a free market (the wisdom of crowds). Of course your counter-argument is that you don’t trust markets but I certainly trust them more than your opinion.

Global warming, I don’t know, sure seems like it to me. The weather here is warmer than it was 30 yrs ago when I was a child. Are humans “The cause?” No, just like cigarettes aren’t “The cause cancer.” But don’t tell me cigarettes aren’t a contributing factor or bad for you!! As a former smoker I can say that I don’t get as many colds as before and I sure breath a lot easier now. Likewise don’t tell me that humans aren’t a contributing factor to the enviornment, we are! Look at LA, they have bad air day advisories. That IS from too much crap put into the air by humans!!

Also what is lost on all of you is the absolute fact that fossil fuels are finite. Which means sooner or later we have to find other sources of energy, which will take time to perfect, so why not sooner. Another fact lost on most of you is the 1000′s of products that use oil products; that’s right 1000′s. All those products go away when the finite amt of oil is used up. So let’s stop being wasteful, recycle and push for green energy.

The decline….. What decline are we talking about? Temperature, or the divergence in tree ring data? The video explains this comment IN CONTEXT. They’re talking about tree rings. See links below.

http://www.skepticalscience.com/Hockey-stick-divergence-problem.html

http://eas8001.eas.gatech.edu/papers/Briffa_et_al_PTRS_98.pdf

Clever as you might be with mathematics, your English comprehension skills are in doubt. Just take a little look at Brian Macker’s post above yours.
Adding oranges to apples doesn’t inavalidate those fruits, it just makes lousy marmalade.
“How else are you going to do it?” you ask. Do what? Convince people that you know exactly what’s going on?

The whole reason the need to “hide the decline” is because if you include the decline then the supposed temperature proxies, tree ring data, don’t correlate to measured temperatures. No correlation means that the data is not a valid proxy. So the whole point of the “trick” is to manufacture a spurious correlation, aka false correlation, and thus false proxy. One can then use the false proxy to generate false historical predictions of temperature.

Michael Mann is incompetent, or dishonest for using such a method.

In addition, the whole idea of trying to correlate physical proxies from Siberia with global temperatures is also idiotic. There is no possible physical mechanism by which a tree (or trees) in Siberia could measure global average temperatures. So even without the truncation to produce a spurious correlation we know that any correlation against global temperature is spurious in the first place.

This ludicrous belief that trees sense global average temperatures is called teleconnect. What’s worse for climatalogists is that they belittle the Medieval Warming Period as being a local phenomena, and therefore not representative of global temps. Talk about having contradictory beliefs.

Tell you what. Since so many climatologists claim to agree with IPCC based on their peer review, and that is based in large part on this nonsense then I have a challenge.

I challenge climatologists to produce an instrument that, had it been placed in a single locale anywhere on earth, will produced measurements that correlate to global average temperature but not to local temperature conditions. Your instrument can use whatever input it wants, rainfall, sunshine, mercury expansion, air pressure, whatever. Hell, even temperature.

You couldn’t design that if you wanted and certainly there is no selective pressure on trees to measure global temperatures, so evolution isn’t going to design one either.

The problem is that the two (actually four) data sets *are* consistent, up to the mid-20th century, where a proxy measure (derived from tree ring data) departs from *observed* data. So while you are right that you have to be careful in merging sets of data gathered under different circumstances, this is not the problem here.

The problem is that there’s something strange happening in the trees: perhaps they are actually *responding* to the warming climate by changing their growth patterns in a way that looks like they think the earth is cooler. Perhaps like a dog panting in the heat. That’s a pretty frightening thought: that the very thing that many people are today taking to be evidence that there is no warming climate could in fact be the trees’ way of saying “So long, and thanks for all the fish.”